


Monsoon Season

by perdiccas



Category: Last Resort (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Chemical warfare, Gen, Hallucinations, Isolation, Military, Submarines, Yuletide 2012
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 06:36:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/594592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perdiccas/pseuds/perdiccas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grace puts her trust in Marcus but he doesn't do the same for her.</p><p>Set during/between 1.06 "Another Fine Navy Day" and 1.07 "Nuke It Out". Some reference to Grace/James but it's not the focus of the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monsoon Season

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladyjax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyjax/gifts).



> Written for Yuletide 2012 for ladyjax, who asked for:  
> *Some acknowledgement of the precariousness of Grace's position as one of the first women submariners.  
> *Grace's view of Marcus and Sam's relationship, important because of her position in the chain of command. 
> 
> I'm afraid I didn't do your prompts or this amazing show (RIP) justice but I tried! I hope you enjoy it and happy Yuletide. ♥
> 
> Thanks to A. for beta reading!

Grace’s father may be – have been – an admiral but she grows up a sailor’s daughter. Her childhood is spent on bases and on boats, the course of her life determined by the Navy before she’s old enough to walk. She knows what the crewmen say about her, under their breaths when they don’t think she’ll overhear or when they don’t care if she does: Lieutenant Shepard, born with a flagpole stuck up her ass. They think she’s frigid, as unbending as the rules of the Navy and just as humourless. They say there’s salt water, cold in her veins. Sometimes, she thinks they may be right. The roil and spill of waves in open water feel as much a part of her as the breath in her lungs or the beat of her heart. 

Now, though, she’s running hot. Her mouth is dry and the conn is suddenly sweltering. Grace has never had trouble finding her sea legs but as the boat dives, the deck seems to shift, swaying unsettlingly beneath her feet. She’s not the only one feeling the effects of the BZ. The crew are stripping off their shirts, revealing undershirts dark with pooling sweat. Everyone is thirsty. Already crewmen are dropping. She hefts a passed out sailor from his station. He’s heavy and her fingers slip against his clammy skin. Grace props him against a bulkhead, safely out of the way, and she ends up doubled over him, panting hoarsely. No matter how long she waits, her nausea never passes.

The conn is locked down to essential personnel only, yet in her peripheral vision, Grace sees shadows that shouldn’t be there. 

Through the miasma of heat and stale air, a hazy figure begins to materialize. She blinks hard and wipes her eyes but it doesn’t clear away the vision of Seaman Stern. She’s not so far gone she can’t tell it’s BZ-induced delirium, encroaching on the edges of her mind, but still she’s unnerved as the phantom Stern stares at her with hollow eyes. Grace has her wits enough about her to wonder how bad things are going to get before the day is done. 

She forces herself away from the bulkhead she’s been leaning on to steady herself. Instead, she focuses on the helm and on their diving depth, and refuses to acknowledge the spectre. In her mind’s ear, though, she can hear Stern’s voice sneering. His final words echo around her: _You’re all going to die, you just don’t know it yet._

Before she’d shaken it off as the empty threat of a cowardly man but with the boat silent, coasting under the water with barely enough of the men awake to keep her manned, anxiety prickles in her, sending a shiver down Grace’s spine. Stern laughs. It’s ominous and overly intimate, almost as if she can feel his unwanted breath on the shell of her ear, the back of her neck. She shudders and spins around quickly, shoving at someone that isn’t there. She only succeeds in tripping over her own feet, stumbling forward before she catches herself. Her face burns as the Captain stares at her intently. 

“All right, Lieutenant?” he asks, concerned. His face is beaded with sweat. Grace can tell he’s struggling, too. 

She squeezes her eyes shut but Stern is still there when she opens them again. “Aye aye, sir.”

As the crew fall asleep one by one, Stern seems content to keep his distance. His skin is a pallid grey, his expression fixed, and from across the conn, he watches Grace silently. It’s a mixed blessing at best. Without his jeers the quiet is starker, and Grace’s eyes are drawn to him again and again. Despite herself, when the rusty red stain on his uniform blooms and spreads outwards across his chest she feels compelled to watch. 

The sudden peal of the fire alarm yanks her out of her stupor. She rushes unsteadily to a monitor to check the boat’s systems. At least Stern’s renewed laughter is drowned out by the blaring klaxon. It’s obvious they need to get the fire under control before it kills them all. Grace doesn’t need the Captain to say it but she winces when he does anyway. 

Behind him, Stern grins maliciously.

Grace has spent her whole career proving people wrong, people who think there’s nothing more to her than her father’s name, or that her gender is a failing and a liability. She hates that here, in Sainte Marina’s waters, she’s said “No, I can’t” more times than she swore she ever would. But there’s something greater at stake, here, than her pride. Staying at the helm alone leaves the life of every crewman in her hands, hands that are shaking in ways that she can’t control. But the Captain won’t hear her refusal. 

When he’s gone, Stern walks in a predatory circle around her, close enough that it’s getting harder for Grace to remind herself he isn’t real. 

“Gracie, Gracie, Gracie, all alone,” Stern sing-songs, his voice dripping with cloying, artificial sympathy. He frowns at her and pouts his lips. “Where’s your daddy, now?”

Grace clenches her jaw and stands taller, heedless of the dizziness she’s feeling. He couldn’t bait her in life and she’ll be damned if she lets his petty jabs get to her now. His pout slides into a slow, lazy grin and she can’t help the sinking feeling that even in not reacting, she’s only giving him what he wants.

He snaps his fingers suddenly. Grace flinches, startled by the sharp sound in the otherwise silent room. “Oh wait, that’s right,” he sneers. “They locked him up so tight he’ll never see the light of day again.” Grace balls her fists, anger rising in her chest. The movement doesn’t go unnoticed – How could it? she tells herself desperately, He’s in her mind. – Stern shakes his head ruefully. “Like father, like daughter, isn’t that what they’re saying? Traitors through and through.”

He steps back a pace giving Grace room to breathe, but she knows it’s only a momentary respite. When he leans back in, his voice is as dead as his eyes. “No, I don’t believe that. Your father is a good man, one who served his country well. It isn’t his fault he raised a treasonous bitch. You may as well have pulled that trigger yourself, Grace, because you’re the one that dragged him down.”

She tries to turn away from him but he grabs her roughly by the shoulders, getting right up in her face and demanding, “How many more of us are you going to kill before we get home?”

Something inside of her snaps. She spits, “If we’re all dead anyway, what does it matter?”

As soon as she says it, she feels her cheeks heat. It’s more than just the drugs working their way through her system, she didn’t want to let him see her loose her control. His fingernails dig viciously into her skin and then he lets go completely, his arms falling limply to his sides. “And there I thought you were better than me, Gracie. Isn’t that what you want us all to think?”

“Screw you,” she says through gritted teeth. “I _am_ better than you, sailor. I would never turn against my Captain.” But she remembers the feel of the firing key in her hand, the heavy certainty in her chest that if ordered, she would turn it, and she wonders if that’s really true. Have her choices been better than Stern’s or has she simply had better luck in choosing who to obey? 

Regardless, she knows what’s right, right now. When she finally falls asleep, succumbing to the BZ, she does so on her feet, never having left her post.

 

Back ashore, the Captain and the XO cloister themselves in the NATO substation planning a shake-down Grace isn’t privy to. Even now, when times are strained, Grace knows better than to take it personally. He may have been Marcus at her father’s dinner table but, contrary what the COB and his cronies like to think, when she’s in uniform, he’s the Captain, nothing more and nothing less. It’s when Sam tosses her bunk as thoroughly as he does the enlisted’s that she begins to take offense. It dawns on her that she’s out in the cold not because whatever went down during the BZ attack is above her pay grade but because despite all that’s happened since they refused to fire on Pakistan, the Captain is uncertain of her loyalty. 

For the first time since they surfaced at Sainte Marina, Grace finds herself on the outside looking in. She thinks this must be how the crew has seen them – her – all along, officers standing together with their heads bowed and their voices low, regarding their own men as they pass with sidelong suspicion. She relays their orders, for more searches and tighter curfews and harsher restrictions of their privileges, without knowing exactly what spurred them on. But as she spies Sam disappearing into the jungle alone for the third time in as many days, she reckons James might be right. 

She wonders if the fifth Black Ops fingered her by name or if she’s guilty only by association. She’s heard the things said about her father and the failed negotiations, as if the shot he took doomed instead of saved them. She considers that maybe that’s how the Black Ops is spinning it now: Admiral Shepard deliberately scuttling talks by any means necessary to stop them all from getting home and speaking the truth. 

The curter the Captain’s words to her become, however, the more she thinks she’ll never know the charges laid against her, why it’s her, out of all the crew, they suspect most strongly of stealing the EpiPens.

Grace tries not to pay attention to the rumours that run rampant through the ranks. She knows from bitter firsthand experience that they’re rarely true and even more rarely flattering but now she suspects there might be something to the story, told in whispers and on drunken breaths, of Sam’s time, held prisoner in North Korea. She studies his face as he returns from his excursions in the jungle. Every day his brow is drawn tighter with stress, something cryptic etched in his expression. She wonders how much it changes a man to be on the other side of that equation, now an interrogator where he was a prisoner before, and how deep of a debt of gratitude Sam feels to the Captain for saving him from a different fate. 

She remembers the Captain’s insistence that there be no question as to the treatment of their POWs. It bothers her that she can’t be sure if his words apply to prisoners he’ll deny to her face that they’ve ever taken. He claims to the world that they’re standing for the truth but all Grace can see these days is the growing list of things he isn’t telling.

 

It takes diffusing a bomb for everything building up to explode inside her. 

Grace loses herself in James’s touch, hoping maybe he’ll stop her from ticking over, too. In the background the waves pound out a steady rhythm in contrast to the frenetic beat of her pulse. A spray of icy sea water mists her overheated skin. 

Afterward, finally feeling calm, she offers him an awkward, “Thanks.”

“Thank _you_ ,” he replies but he doesn’t muster up a leer. And for that, she feels a twinge of guilt. It’s not her place to mess with what James has found here. She understands, now, what it’s like to want to turn your back on the Navy when it has already turned its back on you but she knows that isn’t her. She leaves him on the beach with a shell-shocked expression on his face. 

 

She’s standing in the dark at Stern’s grave when the Captain joins her. “Everything okay, Grace?” 

Despite the familiarity of her first name, she can see the suspicion still scored deeply in his expression.

“Just paying my respects, sir,” she tells him. He nods, but makes no comment. It doesn’t escape Grace’s notice that he’s positioned himself between her and the Black Ops soldiers’ graves.

Her father’s sacrifice may have meant nothing in earning her the Captain’s goodwill, but it’s a legacy she’s come to realise she can’t ignore. The truth must be told, even if that means she has to find it herself. 

She ties back her hair again, where James had pulled it loose, and returns to her post, leaving Marcus behind, out in the cold.


End file.
